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nago-
@nago-

can anyone explain to me why the new superconductor news is so exciting? I don't often read about or deal with the physical sciences so I'm a bit clueless there.

I gather this is very Cool and Exciting but I don't fundamentally appreciate why


lexi
@lexi

stolen from Alex Kaplan on twitter

Today might have seen the biggest physics discovery of my lifetime. I don't think people fully grasp the implications of an ambient temperature / pressure superconductor. Here's how it could totally change our lives.

  1. 100 billion kWh of electricity are wasted on transmission losses each year in the US alone. That's equivalent to 3 of our largest nuclear reactors running 24/7. Superconductivity enables lossless electricity transmission at high voltages and currents.
  2. According to the authors, the [superconducting] LK-99 material can be prepared in about 34 hrs with extremely basic lab equipment (a mortar & pestle, basic vacuum, and furnace). These results could replicate within days-weeks.
[If you're curious, here's the recipe]

The rough recipe for LK-99, see more in the arxiv paper below

  1. Nuclear fusion reactors rely on superconductors for plasma confinement. Modern designs use RBCO/YBCO superconductors cooled with LN2 or Liquid He, creating a huge temperature gradient and challenging operation. Ambient superconductors enable a whole host of new reactor designs.
  2. Quantum computers use superconductors to preserve coherence in qubits. Small changes in temperature and pressure can cause the entire QC to fail during operation. Imagine a room temperature quantum computer on your desktop - now possible.
  3. Superconductors might be the best batteries out there. Simply inject a current and keep it in the coil until you need it. Previously, too costly to maintain. Now, totally feasible.
  4. Your iPhone [will overheat slower] when playing subway surfer with a youtube video in the corner anymore! [More] efficient computer chips [including CPUs, GPUs, RAM etc.] will have 0 resistive losses [and therefore a bit lower power consumption] during operation with superconductors. [Correction: This will make them a bit more effective, but they will still consume a lot of power, at least for now.]
  5. And, the common ones: super-cheap MRI machines, MagLev trains everywhere, and a super efficient electric grid. Basically, this:

that science-future stock photo with weird buildings and flying cars

  1. I cannot contain my excitement. It feels like January of 2020 with a huge wave coming that no one realizes yet, but in a much better way. What a time to be alive!! Check out the original paper:

[Do note that whether this is legit is still unclear, so take this with a grain of salt, but if we really get room-temperature superconductors this is absolutely huge.]


exerian
@exerian

yup, that image sums it up. you can actually do all of that with the new superconductor, assuming it's not a hoax.


Xylaria
@Xylaria

I’ve been telling everyone I know - If this is real, if this pans out, within years we’re going to see a leap in technology that’ll make the internet look like a blip.

This, if reproducible, is the single largest scientific discovery in all our lifetimes.


silverspots
@silverspots

I have (admittedly, mostly unused) degrees in Electrical Engineering and Material Science, and I'm skeptical that this is the Utopia Button that everyone claims it is. When you're selecting a new material for an application, conductivity is only one of several factors you have to consider:

  • Cost
  • Ductility
  • Mechanical Strength
  • Resistance to Corrosion
  • Weight
And that's just off the top of my head. This material won't see widespread use unless it can meet those criteria.

I'm just going to go down the line of the post above and give my own assessment, given my (admittedly not strong) background in the fields in question.

  1. Electricity transmission - The conductor currently used in most transmission lines is an alloy of aluminum, nickel, and cobalt. It's not chosen for its conductivity, it's chosen because it's relatively cheap and easy to draw into long tubes (power lines are hollow, due to an effect known as skin transmission) and it has enough tensile strength to hold itself up and not break due to thermal expansion or light winds. Can this new superconductor do that? I don't know, that study hasn't been done yet.
  2. Ease of construction - This seems like a result that's easy enough to replicate and scale, and the materials aren't exotic. That's a point in its favor.
  3. Nuclear fusion - Fusion is absolutely not my field, but when people talk about gradients, I get nervous. In this case, temperature gradient to what? The inside of the reactor while it's operating? If the reactor runs at 10,000K and your magnets are at 10K, does it really matter all that much if your magnets can operate at 273K instead? It might, not an expert, but this will take time to sort out.
  4. Quantum Computers - Again, not an expert here. This does seem to be a fantastic use case for this superconductor. But nobody's ever really been able to explain how useful a QC is outside of an academic setting, solving specific problems.
  5. Power Storage - This is definitely true. I would expect this to dramatically change the industries where batteries are used, especially cellphones and EVs, assuming that the superconductor doesn't break when you drop your phone and doesn't catch fire in a car crash (although tesla has proven that's not a requirement). But it still comes down to cost, weight, ease of manufacture, etc. And it will take time.)
  6. Computer chips - Computer chips are made from silicon, which is a semiconductor. The reason that the billions of transistors in your phone work is because they don't conduct electricity all the time. A superconductor, by definition, can't do that. Now, there is also some resistance in the gold used in chips, and you could see some gains by replacing gold with superconductor, but that's assuming that you can melt and flow this material exactly like gold and I don't know if you can.
  7. MRI machines - Should work, and would save on liquid helium, making them cheaper to run, and hopefully cheaper to build. This would be great.
  8. Maglev trains - Again, I'm skeptical. The magnetic locking of a superconductor is enough to hold itself up, but you can move it with your hand, at least in the demonstration linked above. That means it will move in response to an outside force. What happens when a 3-ton train is placed atop one of these things? I don't think it's a dealbreaker, just that it will require some clever engineering.

Out of all the things listed, I would rate a couple as industry killing improvements, a couple as totally unfeasible, and everything else somewhere in the middle. Still not bad, but we are not getting the picture up above from just this one material.


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in reply to @nago-'s post:

Magnets will levitate a fixed distance above/below a superconducting material without requiring energy input. This effect theoretically allows for a whole suite of really cool future-tech transportation technologies.

Also roughly 25% of all power generated in the US is lost due to line resistance in the transmission wires. Superconducting power lines would entirely eliminate those losses.

in reply to @lexi's post:

Your iPhone won't overheat when playing subway surfer with a youtube video in the corner anymore! Ultra-efficient computer chips [including CPUs, GPUs, RAM etc.] will have 0 resistive losses [and therefore absurdly low power consumption] during operation with superconductors.

this is the only one of these points I can speak with any sort of authority on and I think it's basically false; MOSFETs have two types of power loss, resistive loss (which is independent of frequency) and switching loss (which varies directly with frequency and results from charging and discharging the transistor gate). taking the ATmega32A from an Arduino as a typical microprocessor for the sake of argument, about 90% of its power usage is switching loss (see page 297, figure 29-2).

would superconducting chips be more power efficient? yes! but would they render microprocessors' power usage effectively zero? I don't think so, at least not for a while. (I don't know enough about electrical engineering to know whether room-temperature superconductors would enable us to eventually design IC processes which require smaller gate charges.)

oh damn, updated the post! i'm not super into EE myself but i think this could still have a lot of impact on IC gate charges, but i think this is going to take a couple of years of research before we see it in action lol